Midwinter Sacrifice aka Midwinter Blood

Not a single muscle of the woman’s face moves, and her skin is whiter than the snow, her pubic hair improbably black, and Malin stops the car and there is still no reaction from the woman.

Frozen to ice?

Dead?

Standing upright, but then Malin sees her ribcage moving gently in and out, and she seems to be swaying slightly in the wind.

Malin feels the midwinter open its door wide as she gets out of the car, how the season takes command of her senses, as if it were resetting her body and condensing the distance between impressions, thoughts and deeds. A naked woman in a field. This just gets madder and madder.

The car door slams shut, but it’s as if the noise was nothing to do with any effort she herself made.

The woman must be freezing, and Malin approaches in silence.

Closer, closer, and soon she is only a few metres from the woman, who stands with her eyes closed, breathing, holding her arms out. Her face is quite calm, and her hair, raven-black, is hanging down her back in a plait.

The plain around her.

It’s only just over a week since they found Ball-Bengt, but the police cordon has been pulled down and the snow that has fallen since then hasn’t managed to hide the evidence left by curious visitors: cigarette ends, bottles, sweet wrappers, hamburger boxes.

‘Hello!’ Malin calls.

No reaction.

‘Hello!’

Silence.

And Malin tires of the game, she knows who she has in front of her, remembers what Borje Svard said after he and Johan Jakobsson went to see Rickard Skoglof.

But what is she doing here?

Malin takes off her thick glove and taps the woman on the nose. Hard, twice, and the woman twitches, leaping back before yelling, ‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘Valkyria? Malin Fors from Linkoping Police. What are you doing out here?’

‘Meditating. And now you’ve disturbed me before I was finished. Do you have any idea how fucking irritating that is?’

It’s as if Valkyria Karlsson is suddenly aware of the cold. She walks round Malin and heads towards her car. Malin follows her.

‘Why here, of all places, Valkyria?’

‘Because this is where he was found murdered. Because this place has its own special energy. You must be able to feel it too.’

‘It’s still a bit odd, don’t you think, Valkyria, you have to admit that?’

‘No, it’s not odd at all,’ Valkyria Karlsson says, getting into the green estate, a Peugeot, and wrapping a long sheepskin coat around her naked body.

‘Did you and your partner have anything to do with this?’ Stupid question, Malin thinks. But stupid questions can provoke good answers.

‘If we did, I’d hardly tell you, would I?’

Valkyria Karlsson closes the car door, and soon Malin is watching the smoke from the exhaust slowly rise into the sky as the car disappears towards the horizon.

Malin turns towards the tree.

Thirty-five metres away.

She forces the image of the naked Valkyria out of her mind, will deal with her later; now she is going to do what she came here for.

Are you here, Bengt?

And she sees the body, swollen and blue, beaten to a pulp, alone, swaying in the wind.

What did all the curious sightseers who have been out here expect to see?

A drifting spirit?

A corpse? To feel the stench of violence, of death, the way it looks in their worst nightmares?

Tourists in a chamber of horrors.

Malin carefully approaches the tree again, lets her heart-rate slow, shutting out all sound, letting the day disappear and be replaced by what happened here, trying to fix the scene in her mind: a faceless person struggling with a sleigh, chains round the body, feet, pulleys like black moons against the starry sky.

Malin is standing right where the branch broke, where Valkyria Karlsson has just been meditating.

Someone has laid a bunch of flowers on the ground, a card inside a plastic sleeve fastened to the bouquet.

Malin picks up the flowers, grey with frost, and reads: ‘What are we going to do now, with no one to fetch our balls?’ Ljungsbro IF football team.

Now you miss him.

In death comes thanks, and after thanks, fire.

Malin closes her eyes.

What happened, Bengt, where did you die? Why did you die? Who had so much hatred? If it was even hatred?

However much I shout you can’t hear me, so I’m not even going to try, Malin Fors. But I am standing here beside you, listening to your words, and I’m grateful for all your efforts, all your trouble. But is it really that important?

Is this really the best thing that you could be spending your time doing?

Her naked white body.

She can make herself immune to the cold. I could never do that.

I know who had so much hatred.

But was it hatred?

Your question is justified.

Perhaps it was despair? Loneliness? Or anger? Or curiosity? A victim? A mistake?

Or perhaps something else, something much worse.

Can I make my words reach you? One single little word? In that case I would like it to be this word.

Darkness.

The darkness that arises when the soul never gets to see the light in another person, when it withers and eventually tries to save itself.

Malin sways with the wind, reaching for the broken branch, the part that is still attached to the tree, but she can’t reach, and in the gap, the space between what she wants and what she is capable of, it becomes clear to her.

This isn’t over for you, is it?

You want something, you want to have something, and this is how you show it.

What is it you want?

What can you get out of a naked body in a tree in a field tormented by winter?

What is it that is worth such longing?

Opposite the imposing yellow-brick facade of the Cloetta chocolate paradise, on the other side of a small park, is a row of houses built in the thirties, detached houses mixed with small blocks of flats, each flat with its own front door and staircase.

Niklas Nyren lives in the block at the end of the street, in the middle flat of three.

Malin rings once, twice, three times, but no one answers.

In the car on the way back from the tree she called him on both his mobile and home numbers; no answer, but she still wanted to try.

But it’s pointless. Not at home.

Margaretha Svensson said he worked as a travelling salesman, selling biscuits, for one of Cloetta’s subsidiary